Book cover of Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in "War and Peace"

Book description

For decades, the formal peculiarities of War and Peace disturbed Russian and Western critics, who attributed both the anomalous structure and the literary power of the book to Tolstoy's "primitive," unruly genius. Using that critical history as a starting point, this volume recaptures the overwhelming sense of strangeness felt by…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Hidden in Plain View as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Hidden in Plain View makes us see Tolstoy in a completely new light. I find Morson one of the most engaging critics of the Russian classics, and this is perhaps his best and most curmudgeonly argumentative book.

It offers a brilliant reading of War and Peace as an “anti-novel”—as an attack on the form and philosophical suppositions of the “novel” (the word in Russian can also refer to a literary or real-life “romance”).

It follows in the footsteps of the Russian critic-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who viewed the novel as a dialogical, open-ended “anti-genre,” without a fixed form, that cannibalizes all…

If you love Hidden in Plain View...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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